NAS or internal hard drive for Mac Mini

Hi guys,
I need some advice before pulling the trigger.
At the moment I’m running Roon Core on my Mac Mini (Late 2012, quad core i7 2.3Ghz, 500Gb SSD), music are stored in the internal ssd. Recently my library reached up 400gb so I’m thinking of buying a NAS and move all the music to the NAS.

There is 3 questions I would like to ask:

  1. Should I buy a NAS or should I buy a dual-hard drive kit with 1TB hard drive for the Mac Mini? Which one is quicker to load music (internal hard drive in Mac Mini or via ethernet if I go with NAS)?

  2. I intend to buy the QNAP TS-251 with 2.4 dual core CPU and 2gb ram, is it ok just to use this NAS to share music library with 3 other computers (Mac Mini, iMac and Macbook Pro)?

  3. Connection: which is the best way to hook up the NAS with the Mac Mini? NAS -> router using ethernet cable or NAS -> straight to Mac Mini via USB Cable?

Hope to receive some experience from you guys. Thank you

List item

Should I buy a NAS or should I buy a dual-hard drive kit with 1TB hard drive for the Mac Mini? Which one is quicker to load music (internal hard drive in Mac Mini or via ethernet if I go with NAS)?

A NAS is more flexible in that you can use it for other purposes.

I intend to buy the QNAP TS-251 with 2.4 dual core CPU and 2gb ram, is it ok just to use this NAS to share music library with 3 other computers (Mac Mini, iMac and Macbook Pro)?

Yes that will perform fine

Connection: which is the best way to hook up the NAS with the Mac Mini? NAS -> router using ethernet cable or NAS -> straight to Mac Mini via USB Cable?

I would connect via ethernet.

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Not talking about other purposes as I only use the Mac Mini / NAS for music streaming.
Do you think NAS will perform better or at least the same as internal hdd on a Mac Mini? I can understand copying will take a bit longer but I need no-lag, non-delay and dropping music streaming…

If you are using wired ethernet then a NAS is fine. However if you only want it to store your music files then I wouldn’t pay the extra for it. Just make sure you have adequate backups, preferably off site, of your music files. And remember a NAS, whilst providing a level of redundancy, should not be considered as providing backup,

I prefer an external ssd with thunderbolt. Very very fast and more performing.

Hard drive speed is not important for the music files. It is important for the Roon database.

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Hi guys,
I think I found the best practice for my music library.
I use Mac Mini as Roon Core and roon database.
Then, QNAP TS-251 store all music library. I separate them as iTunes folder and DSD folder (so I can share iTunes library with other Macs).
The NAS is sitting in the study room, connected to Airport Express via ethernet cable.
All albums have been converted to Apple lossless. This way I can sync them to my iPhone if I want.
And the streaming result is top notch, no lag or any drop outs at all. Roon loads really fast and I no delay.
Below is the screenshot of the signal path while playing Apple lossless file or FLAC, when playing DSD128 the processing speed is down to 5x but still no lag or delay at all.